Emerson was the greater artist. His essays contain some of the most beautiful language in our literature. How Henry James could ha...ve thought he had never developed a "style" is to me one of the mysteries of criticism. Thoreau in Walden comes close to the master, but he falls behind in the homeliness of his details and in the occasional smugness of his social satire. It almost seems as if he were reacting against the chiseled beauty of Emerson's prose. The latter's sentences were so fine that he needed nothing else. They became, like marble statues, part of the garden that was Concord. Their composer, serene, calm, detached, bland in speech and manner, the soft-spoken philosopher revered by all, did not often trouble himself on his strolls in the woods and along the river to pluck the flowers or feed squirrels or even identify the different species of flora and fauna. As Thoreau observed, he wouldn't have been willing to trundle a wheelbarrow through the streets of Concord because it would have seemed out of character. Emerson communed with nature on a spiritual level, using his eyes to take in the landscape and his lungs the fresh air. He had no needs to brace himself with cold or rain or spend the night under the stars.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

Miss Mary Emerson is here,--the youngest person in Concord, though about eighty,--and the most apprehensive of a genuine thought; ...earnest to know of your inner life; most stimulating society; and exceedly witty withal. She says they called her old when she was young, and she has never grown any older. I wish you could see her.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

Thank you and Mrs. Emerson for your long kindness to me.... I have been your pensioner for nearly two years, and still left free a...s under the sky. It has been as free a gift as the sun or the summer, though I have sometimes molested you with my mean acceptance of it,--I who have failed to render even those slight services of the hand which would have been for a sign at least; and, by the fault of my nature, have failed of many better and higher services. But I will not trouble you with this, but for once thank you as well as Heaven.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

Of the creative spirits that flourished in Concord, Massachusetts, during the middle of the nineteenth century, it might be said t...hat Hawthorne loved men but felt estranged from them, Emerson loved ideas even more than men, and Thoreau loved himself.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

Despite many assertions to the contrary, the brain is not "like a computer." Yes, the brain has many electrical connections, just ...like a computer. But at each point in a computer only a binary decision can be made--yes or no, on or off, 0 or 1. Each point in the brain, each brain cell, contains all the genetic information necessary to reproduce the entire organism. A brain cell is not a switch. It has a memory; it can be subtle. Each brain cell is like a computer. The brain is like a hundred billion computers all connected together. It is impossible to understand because it is too complex. As Emerson Pugh wrote, "If the human brain was so simple that we could understand it, we would be so simple that we couldn't."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

Most thoughtful Americans of today seem to have forgotten how strongly their own and immediate predecessors, Emerson, Hawthorne an...d Whitman, were still preoccupied with the essence behind things.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

Hawthorne--like Poe--became a kind of virtuoso in the fiction of the inner life: the only novelist from New England as subtle as E...merson and Dickinson. He was able to present in the current style the extraordinary burden on the New England mind of the past, its moral introspection, its unending self-confrontation. Poe, his only equal in the "tale," was really a convert to aesthetic medievalism, an apologist for slavery, order, and hierarchy, a writer of "grotesques and arabesques" who saw the power of blackness as personal damnation and a way of practicing literary terror. It is the force of the repressed that Poe made his drawing card, the power not of the past but of the dead, as phantoms preying on unsleeping guilt. Hawthorne remained a child of Puritanism, rooted in the village, the theocracy, the rule of law, the numbing force of convention. Poe, by contrast, is forever homeless, landless, seeking a visionary home in some Platonic heaven of eternal Beauty, writing his most poignant poems out of a profound homesickness that operated as a curse.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

America's two most important intellectual forebears are conceivably Franklin and Emerson. Franklin, however, makes us a little une...asy. Poor Richard is at once too goody-goody and too worldly. He argues the prudential approach to life almost too well: he blends copybook morality with eighteenth-century realism; his is the philosophy of the main chance without the cushioning of the noble motive. The special quality in Franklin is that he foreshadowed, with his philistine counsel, what America was to become, while indicating, through his unflinching worldliness, what it would cease to be. The better, the more central, the more congenial spokesman was Emerson, whose gift for giving a special emphasis and elevation to words has offered us a method for sliding over or circumventing things; whose fine aphorisms are the ancestors, at times even the blood brothers, of our trademarks and slogans; whose own transcendental visions coagulated or curdled into a great variety of mystical con-games; and whose deep concern for ideas could be made a kind of evasion of realities. Unlike Poor Richard, Emerson doesn't show us up--nor for that matter, pin us down. He is genuinely great without being uncomfortably specific.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »